When our Master of Business Operational Excellence health-care students spent some with Kathryn Correia, chief of Minnesota’s HealthEast Care System, she brought up a great point about the things that slow us down. Most of the interruptions that impede the flow of care, she said, aren’t surprises. If a machine breaks down, we know that somewhere we missed out on the preventive maintenance. If patients, providers or staffs are waiting for too long, we know that we have not really designed our processes to meet the demand. Defects occur because we have long been fixing symptoms but not the root causes.

This was one interesting insight in a busy week for the students, who heard from a number of instructors.

Lean expert Art Byrne, speaking to our MBOE cohort.

Bill Boyd, director plan development at Wisconsin’s ThedaCare, spent some time with students explaining how the company has adopted the value stream approach to enhance the patient experience and quality and efficiency of care. He emphasized how important it is to stop working in silos and come together as a team to address the care needs of patients.

Post-lunch, the health-care and industry cohorts spent three hours with Gary Butler and yours truly in an emergency department simulation. They applied their learnings in understanding the wastes in the process and improving the efficiency and quality of care the patients received. The simulation is designed to help understand how lean principles apply to a non-manufacturing process.

The day came to an end with a visit from Art Byrne, an expert in lean strategy, and Tom Mooney, manager of Lean Transformations at Goodyear. Byrne has been implementing lean from the position of a President, CEO or Chairman of the organizations he worked with since the last 20 years. He shared his perspective on the role the leaders have to play to successfully implement lean and sustain the gains. He left the students with a thought his sensei Chihiro Nakao once said to him: “Byrne San, if you don’t try something, no knowledge will visit you.” Lean is all about trying out ideas. If you don’t try, how will you know about the process you are improving?

Mooney gave a different twist to the challenges of a lean practitioner. He said to the students, “You are a virus!” He emphasized that the change agents always get resistance from almost everyone. The resistors are like the antibodies who are trying to dissuade and destroy the change agents. He urged the students to keep going, coach others and multiply the lean knowledge rapidly to bring change in the organization.